My Story

My parents were very busy people, having thrown themselves into bettering themselves, by night schooling, where they met.

They had me and my brother, and got grants for further education as mature students, the grants were actually a little more than the wages they were getting, so you can tell we were not rolling about in dosh.

But life became very interesting for them and me and my brother in the company of all these young students, and my mother and father seemed to fit in no problem with “The Young Crowd”. I remember boozy nights back at the flat (apartment) with these educationalists, who were fascinating to me.

Attired in brightly coloured 60’s fashion, and all the stuff the 60’s were about, it all flowed through my early life in Aberdeen.

Life was good, my parents qualified with good degrees and became teachers, and everything was plateauing out nicely… or so I thought… then at the age of 14 everything changed in my life.

I remember vividly the old farmers tipper truck turning up open topped, no roof, probably the week before it transported turnips alternating with fish guts and building material who knows?

But this was the truck of our new neighbour, “Dougy The Vest”, was a road hauler, and it was one of his fleet of two trucks.

It had been specially newly painted in his livery, it was immaculate, a working drivers work of art, but again the curtain twitching was at fever pitch, those pink rinsed, pearl necklace, women of a certain age, couldn’t wait to pick up the phone, and make malicious social comment, way before facebook and such, about “The Simpsons” latest social “faux pas”.

So we as a family moved house as we had done before, little did I know this would be a regular occurrence I think I stopped counting at 22 moves in my life.

So two professional well thought of teachers and their two kids 14 and 12 years of age, at critical times in the kids development and education, uproot from a nice ordered presentable life to instead, own and run a dockside bar, 40 miles North of the city of our birth, into the wilds of the North East of Scotland.

Quite a change for a grammar school boy, I can tell you, and so it was the summer of 76 a famous beautiful long hot summer, boy was it was different.

We all missed Aberdeen, we missed our friends, we missed everything about Aberdeen, we were now in a very small fishing village surrounded by farmers, fishermen and locals who spoke a very strange dialect of “The Doric”.

So there we were plunged into the community of fishing and farming about which I knew Jack Shit. The summer of 76 it was the “Long Hot One”, so me and my brother spent the summer outside cycling exploring getting to know the place, having little adventures and swimming on the beach and sunbathing and getting brown, my fashionably “well it was in Aberdeen!” hair went blonde yeah that would be a problem later on!